Further images

When speaking on her relationship with Ernst in an interview, Tanning said: "I was a loner, am a loner, good Lord, it's the only way I can imagine working. And then when I hooked up with Max Ernst, he was clearly the only person I needed and, I assure you, we never, never talked art. Never."
Ernst was married to Peggy Guggenheim when he met Tanning on a visit to het studio, in order to consider her work to a group show at The Art of this Century.
"If it wasn’t known that I had been a Surrealist, I don’t think it would be evident in what I’m doing now. But I’m branded as a Surrealist. Tant pis."
(By the late 1960s, Tanning’s paintings were almost completely abstract, yet always suggestive of the female form.) WIKI
As many Rococo scholars have argued the dog serves as an erotic metaphor, an idea Tanning had already investigated in the early 1950s with Tableau vivant. The intermingling of the dog and body returns as a major theme throughout the 1970s as does a swirling eroticization of amorphous nudes in such tumbling visual orgies as ‘Family Portrait’ and Notes for an Apocalypse’. If the kaleidoscope was still in use by this point then it presents a close up view of the body which abstracts and contorts its articulation into fleshy humanoid shapes which both merge and split from each other.

Provenance

Collection of the artist;The Estate of Dorothea Tanning;The Destina Foundation, New York.